KEY POINTS:
Michael Hurst doesn't look like Michael Hurst. The mere addition of a moustache has altered his entire physiognomy by ageing him and making him appear heavier.
As soon as he swaps a pair of nondescript polyester pants and business shirt for jeans and a jumper and ruffles his hair a bit, he is back to looking like himself - youthful, energetic and totally immersed in the latest production he is working on - Blackbird by Scottish playwright David Harrower. Hurst's chameleon-like ability in terms of changing his appearance is entirely apt for a play where nothing is as it seems.
Hurst plays 56-year-old Ray, recently released from prison and building a new life far away from his old haunts. The past catches up with him when Una (played by Liesha Ward Knox), a woman Ray had a relationship with 15 years before, tracks him down to the debris-littered lunchroom of a nameless factory where he works.
She has seen his picture in a trade journal and, full of rage and fear, wants answers about why the relationship ended. But their confrontation prompts more questions than it answers and what follows is high psychological drama as Ray and Una pick over the remnants and repercussions of their relationship - if that's how it can be defined.
First performed at the Edinburgh Festival in 2005, Blackbird quickly transferred to London's West End, winning the 2007 Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play.
It has become something of a slow-burning global phenomenon, with simultaneous premieres on both American coasts and at the Sydney Theatre Company under Cate Blanchett's direction. Blanchett brought a production to Wellington earlier this year for the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts, and before that the capital's Circa Theatre staged a version.
Described variously as a brilliant, unnerving and controversial modern tragedy, Blackbird examines - often brutally - questions of innocence and guilt, love and sexual obsession, integrity and morality.
Auckland Theatre Company artistic director Colin McColl said as soon as he heard about the Edinburgh Festival production, he knew it contained all the elements which make relevant and exciting theatre. "A good story, brave but flawed characters, wonderful writing and a moral dilemma that would leave audiences in furious debate," he says.
Set and costume designer Robin Rawstone has deliberately confined the action to a sliver of space on one side of the Maidment Theatre stage to heighten the characters' feelings of entrapment. A window behind them, where people walk past now and again, indicates that the world is watching and will never quite leave Ray and Una alone.
"Everyone will have an opinion on what has gone on between Ray and Una," says Rawstone. "But these matters are often treated very simplistically when, in fact, they are [far] more complex. The audience will certainly have a lot to think and talk about as long as we let the play speak for itself and if they are adult enough to confront the issue in a mature, rather than simplistic, way."
Hurst agrees. He describes Blackbird as the sort of play that actors and audiences alike initially approach with their arms crossed, with an entrenched position on the issues which unfold.
"I read it with my arms folded knowing it was going to be provocative but it still contained surprises. Eventually, I was lying in bed reading it and then it got to the end and I sat bolt upright because I did not see what happens coming."
Director Margaret-Mary Hollins had a similar experience. "For the first few pages, I thought, what's really going on here and I started to become increasingly caught up in the dialogue, the humanity of the story. I got to the end and just went, 'Wow.' It's a very powerful piece because it challenges conventional ideas and really makes us question whether we're dealing with a human dilemma or a social problem."
The nature of the play may offend some people but McColl isn't one to avoid contentious material. This time last year he programmed the highly polarising The Pillowman.
McColl says he likes to think ATC's audiences are intelligent enough to see past the controversial subject matter to discover Blackbird is a metaphor for personal freedom and whether we are shackled by the events of our past. "It is a fine example of modern British playwriting," he says.
Hurst was cast early for the part of Ray but Hollins admits she agonised about who should play Una and auditioned numerous young female actors. She says Ward Knox, fast becoming an ATC favourite with roles in My Name is Gary Cooper and Design for Living, stood out because of her ability to confront the requirements of the emotionally demanding script yet not bring her own agenda to it.
"Liesha didn't play it as a diatribe, which in the wrong hands it could become," says Hollins. Hurst recalls Ward Knox's audition as so intense he forgot his lines - so focused was he on her performance.
It is Ward Knox's biggest role to date and she admits to deeply feeling the characters' pain and intensity.
"Sometimes tears well up in my eyes as I think about what they're saying and what this experience has meant for both of them."
PERFORMANCE
What: Blackbird
Where and when: Maidment Theatre, September 4-27
